TEDxIEM Salt Lake

Her, by Spike Jonze, follows Theodore Twombly as he falls in love with the witty and vivacious Samantha, an AI. Surrounded by saturated colors and constant conversation, he is still deathly alone. The environment around him bright, but sterile. Recently, I saw a person on the metro talking about what "they" should order for dinner that day. To an AI model. Nobody blinked. This is the age of connection. Everyone is always present. Nobody is always present. Social media battered us with its constant onslaught of performances. When OpenAI released ChatGPT, the common man had, at the cusp of their hands, a machine that could learn their quirks, remember whatever they said, and reply exactly the way they wanted to hear it. It arrived as relief. We are used to being misunderstood, betrayed, or sad, or feeling down even on our best days. That's what people do. Real people forget things. They get angry, disagree with you, refuse to simply agree that you're right. A chatbot doesn't. It hypes up your choices. It tells you that you can't be in the wrong. So why put away the rose-tinted glasses when nothing is forcing you to? Students go from asking AI for homework answers to telling it how hard their day was. Nobody decided that. It happened one convenient conversation at a time, until the machine started becoming our friend. In this hyperconnected world, we've started mistaking recognition for knowing. When a chatbot replies by referencing something you told it last week, it feels like being known. Eventually, people start preferring the machine over the people: it’s one less argument a day, one less moment trying to defend yourself. Slowly, normal disagreements start to feel tumultuous. We’ve been taught to take the easier way in our life, and that we do, losing a part of ourselves in the process. People only reciprocate your connection when you put in enough efforts. The day you look up from your screen, you realise how many people you have who are truly close to you and understand you instead of echoing your thoughts. That is the moment you realise: while you were chasing the path of less disagreements, isolation settled in. Theodore never chose to be alone. He simply stopped noticing the difference between being heard and being understood, until the difference was gone. Look up before the room goes quiet.